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http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/thrown-under-the-bus/

Thrown Under the Bus!

Wow, do I feel lucky today. January 1st 2013 and my Congress and President kept me from falling off that dreaded fiscal cliff. Whew, was that a close call: down to the wire, a frightening ordeal… especially the way those boys and girls in the newsrooms made our collective demise seem more than inevitable. I thought for sure they would throw us all under the bus. But, I am lucky to have a wise Uncle Sam watching my back… just as Erika Menendez was watching the back of that poor Hindu-American businessman before she pushed him to his death in front of an onrushing subway train in New York City last week. They say Sunando Sen was just chasing his American Dream. Little did he realize that another American dreamer, one a bit more disillusioned and delusional, was chasing him as well; and then she did throw him under the… subway car. Well, perhaps she took all this talk about the fiscal cliff literally and decided it was time to take matters into her own hands. She just didn’t want her fellow traveler to suffer through the final moments of collapse. Of course, my Uncle Sam would never do that to me; throw me under the bus, I mean.

OK, so now the media is telling us that Erika was a little berserk – well, who isn’t these days, seems to be in style “from sea to shining sea;” and she understandably mistook the dark-skinned Hindu immigrant for a dreaded Muslim terrorist, you know, one of those bad guys that Uncle Sam and his media friends have constantly reminded us to be wary of. And this woman reiterated that same sense of dread in her own words when questioned earlier this week; she wanted to get back at all those Muslims who got us on September 11th. She sounded no more irrational to me than GW Bush did to his fellow Americans over a decade ago. In fact this woman said she has been “beating them (Muslims) up” ever since that dreaded day. Well, what do you know, it is not unlike what Uncle Sam has been doing around the globe, especially in MENA, since that day as well. After all, she thought the darker-skinned man was a Muslim so it was justified in her mind, never mind that she was mistaken and that he became just some collateral damage in her private war on terror: a minor error in judgment resulting from her rather hasty miscalculation.

That’s the price of war, declared or not. And Uncle Sam knows all about collateral damage and the price of undeclared war; speaking of prices… here we are back to that fiscal cliff thingy again. Perhaps that’s what all the deaths are about the past few years in the good old USA, just a lot of collateral damage resulting from the disillusioned judgment of brainwashed and delusional citizens defending their misguided conception of rights and entitlements – home and homeland. The average American has had it drilled into her/his head that the enemy must be stopped at all costs. Sieg heil! That message has gone hand-in-glove with the general background noise of American exceptionalism, manifest destiny, might makes right, infinite expansion, continual progress, perfection, and an ontological apperception of guilt that haunts every John or Jane Doe who feels themselves under-appreciated, devalued, debased, abused, unsuccessful, virtualized, or otherwise marginalized by the dominant psychotic culture of competitive consumption.

I think the incidents in Connecticut and New York this holiday season aptly summarize the state of our nation and the spiraling lunacy characterizing our self-destructive descent. They seem to encapsulate the speed and trajectory of our decline, just as hurricane Sandy made it clear that our technologies and our systems will not survive the onslaught of a scorned mother nature. If the dominant culture is focused on extracting the last pound of flesh from each and every citizen-subject, as it clearly is on sucking the life out of Gaia, then one cannot expect all of the body politic to remain quietly in line waiting for their next beating. There are a certain percentage of folks already on the edge and struggling to make sense (or find a place) in a world where only the senseless (those without feeling) survive.

Don’t misread me. I am not trying to defend the heinous acts of Erika Menendez, James Holmes, Jacob Tyler Roberts, Adam Lanza, et. al. Nor, am I suggesting that their motives were by any means identical. What is apparently the case, I fear, is that our culture is leading more and more individuals over the edge: hyper-rationality breeds insanity. Hyper-individualism breeds contempt. Hyper-nationalism breeds fear and reprisal. Hyper-competitiveness breeds jealousy. But, on top of these diseases of the soul, our political system itself is a joke, with fattened hucksters living off their wealthy sponsors and power-brokered relations. The financial system is a sham, with other fattened hucksters sucking the life-blood out of us, its victims. The economic system is a con-game of indentured servitude within a labyrinth of serial and exponentially increasing consumption. At the macro-level, this society takes from all peoples and places globally, and returns little of real value.

Children, we know, learn from watching their elders. In a culture stuck at our infantile stage of psychological maturation, the weakest among us will unthinkingly follow the sad example of their leaders. And, as far as the most vulnerable members of our society, we will continue to allow them to play with powerful toys and without proper adult supervision. We encourage and applaud their delusions of greatness and their solipsistic ejaculations of self-adulation; then we watch in horror as they come to realize there is no exit, and that the only recourse is to strike-out or strike-back. And, the result is most often deadly. Just look at Erika, Adam, or yes, even Barry.

Once an entire culture loses its sense of connectedness to the earthly sensuous, its fundamental rootedness and intertwining with nature – where everything outside itself becomes simply another sign of Otherness to be manipulated, controlled or eliminated - there the arrogance of transcendental consciousness takes hold of the soul, transforming it into an otherworldly spirit on a divine mission… whether it is the mission of POTUS coolly selecting assassination targets overseas, Lloyd Blankfein dutifully “doing God’s work” at Goldman Sachs by rifling grandma’s retirement account, or Erika Menendez throwing a suspected ‘Muslim’ under the bus. Who among these has committed the more heinous crime?

Anyway, if you are buying the bullshit story of the Pres. and the press that the fiscal cliff deal was your saving grace, think again, and follow the money trail back to Wall Street –the same Wall Street that financed and orchestrated the snuffing out of the OWS movement. And if you further believe that we all are being just a bit too paranoid, then sit back and reflect on the involuntary release of documents from the Domestic Security Alliance Council. So, who is getting thrown under the bus now?

.....And here is part of the first comment to this missive:

Disaffected says:
January 4, 2013 at 6:47 am

Happy New Year Sandy! It’s 2013 now and the kid gloves are off all around. I think it’s safe to say that from here on out the corporate/government noose is only going to get tighter for us all – an entirely foreseeable and natural response to the end of the fossil fuel enabled industrial capitalist era that has kept us all warm and comfy for the past 200 years or so. The ride down the far side of Hubbert’s Peak promises to be every bit as interesting as the prognosticators have been forecasting – and to think, we’re just getting started! It’s safe to say now that the US government – a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall St Inc. now – is entirely committed to the idea of wringing every last drop from the current oil economy, looming epic environmental and economic catastrophes notwithstanding. And in the end, what other choice did they/we have past about 1970 or so? It’s looking increasingly like that was the inflection point for the current state of affairs; the last chance for the earth and humans in the face of what has turned out to be a monumentally stupid gamble on our part to embrace the allures of an energy source that made us seem like gods, but in the end only revealed our basic petty thieving natures all the more efficiently.

At this point, the only question to my mind is which catastrophe is going to get to feed on our carcasses first (and in actuality, it will likely be a combination of hammer blows from them all): will it be the financial sorting out (which is already in progress and could collapse precipitously at any time) and plain old fashioned starvation/deprivation, or will it be the resource wars (ditto) and quick annihilation, or will it be death due to “natural disaster,” as the planet repudiates with extreme prejudice all of our current stupidity? I would only add, the current conflagration does seem historically noteworthy in that all of these factors seem to have “peaked” simultaneously, which probably shouldn’t be surprising, as they all have the same root cause. An historically anomalous one time only gift of concentrated energy of almost unimaginable proportions that laid dormant for millions of years, just waiting for us to come along and unlock its potential for both good and evil in our decidedly unevolved hands......